Last chance to catch film noir Gun Crazy, Thursday night at Cinema du Parc – with French subtitles, too

Gun Crazy is a film noir from 1950. While not high art, I found it interesting for its own sake and as an historical document.

Bart Tare is a young boy with an unholy fascination with guns. He brings one to school, to the delight of his schoolmates, and the horror of the teachers. (Seeing this now, I couldn’t help but think of all the shootings that have taken place in schools, in the years since then. Who wouldn’t?) Bart surrenders this gun to the sheriff, but later he steals another from the window of a hardware store.

These two events earn him four years in reform school, but only after a chatty courtroom scene that conveniently fills us in on Bart’s history (he is being brought up by his older sister, etc.) but seems way too casual and folksy to be believed. When Bart is asked to explain his love of guns, he says that they make him feel good and shooting them is the only thing he know how to do well. He does not say one word about the American Constitution, or the Second Amendment, though. I kinda liked that!

Bart’s best friends, Dave and Clyde, appear as character witnesses, telling the judge about the time that Bart ignored their jibes at his masculinity, and refused to kill a mountain lion, though he surely could have. In time we will notice that Young Dave and Clyde and the grown up Dave and Clyde like the same kind of jackets. They will become be a reporter and a policeman, respectively, which is highly convenient, in terms of moving the story along. The adult, bespectacled Dave even bears a slight resemblance to Clark Kent. Well, I thought so, anyway. Their youthful testimony is all for naught and Bart is sent away.

We do not see Bart at reform school, nor do we see the time he spends in the army. He comes back to town as a grown up man, and seemingly looks up his friends before he even visits his sister. At a visiting carnival he falls under the spell of sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr, “toast of London, England” and before you know it, he has run off with her. Not too long after that, they are criminals on the run, robbing banks and diners because Annie does not want to live on the $40 a week that Bart says he could make working at the Remington gun company. She wants “things, big things and lots of them!” By this point Bart seems more Annie Crazy than Gun Crazy.

I know that the femme fatale is a noir staple, but I found this crass, materialist stereotype rather upsetting. On the other hand, it is clear that Annie really does love Bart, even though she leads him away from the straight and narrow. On the other, other hand, Annie has no qualms about shooting people, which makes her damn scary.

There’s one scene where Bart uses the front page of a newspaper to draw a diagram of their next heist – this lets us know that we are now in Albuquerque, N.M. Clever, no? Annie and Bart do not hide their faces when committing their holdups and sometimes they even wear the cowboy outfits from their time in the carnival. Not so clever.

Pretty soon police in several states are looking for them. They won’t be able to run forever. My thoughts about that? Low level crime rarely pays, in the movies or in real life. Not then and not now. But if Annie and Bart had gone into politics or running banks instead of robbing them, they might have had a different life altogether. White collar crime is where it’s at!

Gun Crazy, 9 pm, Thursday, March 20, 2014
Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, with John Dall, Peggy Cummins, and a very young Russ (Rusty) Tamblyn, The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, though his name could not appear in the credits because he was on the “Hollywood Blacklist” at the time. Actor Morris Carnovsky, who plays the sympathetic Judge Willoughby ended up on the list himself later on.
Gun Crazy is 86 minutes long and has French subtitles.
Cinema du Parc 3575 Park Ave, Montréal QC H2X 3P9

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